Website Design And Business

According to research conducted, it takes less than two-tenths of a second for an online visitor to form an opinion about your brand. This means that your website design can either secure that a consumer purchases your product or make them search for alternatives. When your website design has less than a second to create an impression, you need to understand precisely which things need to be top-priority.

Here’s how these design elements affect your online business and how you can optimise each feature to leave a lasting impact

Navigation

Effortless and agile navigation on your website will develop trust in the customer’s mind. When a website opens itself up to be researched, it exposes itself to the customer which leads the customer to trust that the website has nothing to hide. There should be proper breadcrumbs on each web page that help the customer keep track of where he is within the website.

Apart from being swift, the navigation should be aesthetically inventive as well. Even without experimenting too much with animated buttons, you can play around with basic lines and shapes to give your website a fresh look amongst the thousands of websites that your customers browse everyday.

Primary Image

Viewers are captivated by visuals. Large visuals. If you’re using a primary visual on your home page, you’re making sure that the customer’s eyes are directed towards a single point of focus. It can then become effortless for you to guide their eyes to a call-to-action. The elementary image should be crisp, should be colour-managed for the web and optimised for fast download.

Although, the only rule is that there are no rules. Even if you don’t have a large visual, you can still guide the user’s eyes with placement of other design elements on your webpage.

Content

Your website’s content should be customized for your customer. Instead of ranting on and on about how much your company has achieved over the years, your target should be to tell clients and customers how you can help them attain their goals. The tone and voice of your website should be personal and according to the age and persona of your customers. Focus on one reader instead of trying to reach out to millions. Always remember the KISS rule (Keep It Simple Silly).

Popular Posts

Popular posts are to website designs what Britney Spears is to Pepsi commercials. If you’re running a blog, it is always good to showcase what people are recommending. It works as an endorsement from real readers. If you have a post that has been recently added, let your visitor know so that he can read up on the latest that your website or blog has to offer.

Sharing Is Caring

Adding sharing buttons for social media pages secures that your visitors will be able to voice their opinions about your brand instantly. This gives them the potential to share their thoughts with their friends on the spot. Meanwhile, it gives you the power to track what people are speaking about you. You can audit the amount of incoming traffic coming from social media links, search engine queries or other forms of advertising.

A visitor predicts to see share buttons on a website. So adding them doesn’t give you bonus points. However, if you don’t add share buttons, you’ll have exasperated viewers searching for them and then leaving your page grumbling about an outdated website.

Aesthetics

Remember that the human brain is wired to notice the astonishment. What we have covered in this list so far deals with the technical features of the website. Something that the development team is expected to do. What we’ll now talk about is something for the design department to look into. Aesthetic design is a subject in itself, but broadly, a website’s design language should be consistent.

Remember that lines, shapes, colours and textures all create a mood and evoke a feeling. You need to synergise what your website evokes with the kind of perception you want to create in the customer’s mind.

In the end, your website’s aesthetics can only exercise a certain amount of control on the viewer’s mind. If you want to create a better impression, you need to look beyond aesthetics and come to terms with practicalities in web design as well. Features such as recent posts can double your search engine presence while share buttons can increase the number of eyeballs coming to your website. Curate the content according to your target audience’s personalities and give them an easy menu to navigate through your website.

Lastly, take a step back and analyse your website as a whole. Look at it as a person. Is it dressed well? Is it too formal, or too casual? Does it look over-burdened with text or is it begging for attention? Confront your website’s weaknesses and ruthlessly axe down any unnecessary content. Each element on the web page should have a solid reason for being there, otherwise your viewers will come to your website, think “so what?” and leave without a second thought.